Moore’s Law and Flight Simulator Cockpits

How many times have you cursed your flight simulator for being slow, stuttering, sticky or otherwise just lacking enough horsepower. We all crave that smooth experience of a well tuned system. When we finally get it right, we promptly go and buy more add-ons, tweak up our visual settings or upgrade the simulator (X-Plane 11 is about to be released) and wind up with an un-flyable monster. In the “old days” there was a concept called Moore’s law which effectively promised large performance gains when you upgraded your CPU.

A low resolution image of an originally very high resolution photograph attempting to show the impossibly complex architecture of the Intel KabyLake CPU.

While the boys and girls at Intel may have just released their latest “Kabylake” CPU generation, it sports nowhere near the huge performance gains when compared with the previous “Skylake” series that we saw in the CPU generation comparisons of yesteryear. Desktop PCs are unfortunately not gaining as much processing power as I would have hoped. While Moore’s law in terms of net quantity of integrated transistors is still struggling to be valid, raw CPU power is definitely not doubling every few years as a result.

So what is the solution? How do we get to actually see the best quality our simulators can produce?

We take a leaf out of the big boys’ mainframe supercomputers. They utilize a principle called parallel processing where software splits the calculations across many CPUs. We can utilize the same principle in our flight simulator cockpits. We hook up a system of distributed processing whereby one PC (lets call it the “Master PC”) runs the actual simulation. It handles the bulk of the flight model and provides a clickable graphical image of the controls and dials in a virtual cockpit. Then, via a simple high-speed (1Gb/s) ethernet network, a whole bunch of other “Slave” PCs are controlled by the “Master PC”. Each of these “Slave” computers show a portion of the external view. This outside view might be a single large monitor only showing the view out of the front windscreen, or a whole panoramic surround view made up of many monitors arranged in a semicircle.

One of the most intensive processing and graphics tasks of the simulator is rendering the external view. If we can therefore share the work load by relieving the “Master” computer of rendering the outside view by delegating this task to one or more “Slave PCs” we will wind up with better performance from the “Master” and a far better external view.

Contact Dave Britzius

A more Realistic Flight Simulator

One PC and one monitor does not make a flight simulator seem very real. Add a second high-power PC, a few monitors, a yoke, pedals and joystick and you are much closer to the feel of a real aircraft. Now go a step further and enclose a flight simulator into a cockpit shell, surround yourself with monitors powered by a few PCs and things get interesting… Now if you want help setting all this lot up, contact me:Dave BritziusCape Town, South Africa:
Office Telephone: +27 21 558 7076
Mobile: +27 83 270 7787or much better, click here to e-mail me

Build your own Flight Simulator Cockpit?

Flight simulation is fun on a single PC, but a flight simulator cockpit can improve the experience immensely. If you are serious about virtual flying, studying for your pilot’s licence, or maintaining your PPL proficiency, you really want to consider a built-up cockpit. Take a look at my E-Book containing full instructions (many hundreds of pages) of how to build your own flight simulator cockpit. It will require basic woodworking skills and a room big enough (to get the right immersion, it has to be life-sized).